Donald Trump has said he is scaling back joint US military drills with South Korea aimed at deterring North Korea, despite military officials from both countries warning that Kim Jong-un’s regime is learning new battlefield tactics from the Ukraine war. The president said he was “not happy” with US participation “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong-un”. He added that the drills were costly and “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a country that, as long as Donald J Trump has been president, has been unthreatening and respectful”.
Trump added that it was too late to cancel the drills so he had ordered the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to “substantially reduce” them. Why are there continuing concerns about USS Abraham Lincoln? Democrats have intensified their demands for answers from the Trump administration over conditions onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln amid concern over crew morale, mental health and living conditions.
Ruben Gallego, a Democratic senator from Arizona, said he blamed the carrier’s prolonged deployment on the unresolved war that Donald Trump started in February with Iran as well as lackluster leadership in general from the Republican president’s administration. Donald Trump’s son-in-law and envoy, Jared Kushner, held a rare meeting with Hamas’s political chief on Sunday in Egypt, in a new diplomatic effort to make progress on the stalled Gaza ceasefire. On Monday, Kushner will meet Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who is under pressure after rejecting the new 15-point, US-backed roadmap.
The roadmap involves Hamas gradually giving up its weapons while Israeli forces halt attacks and begin withdrawing from Gaza. Netanyahu says Israel will not retreat from any position in Gaza until Hamas has been completely disarmed. Israel has killed more than 1,200 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded more than 4,100 since agreeing to the ceasefire on 10 October 2025, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
The US attorney general, Todd Blanche, on Sunday declined to assure that the federal justice department he helms would always act independently of the White House and Donald Trump. Blanche also claimed Trump would never ask him to do something that crossed an ethical or legal line. Blanche added: “I swore to the constitution of the United States, like every cabinet secretary has done, and like every attorney general before me has done.
And so this narrative that’s mostly pushed by the left and pushed by the media that the president’s going to pull me aside and ask me to do something illegal is completely a false narrative, not true, will not happen and hasn’t happened.” The Republican senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor who voted to confirm the anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy as federal health secretary in early 2025, on Sunday denounced Donald Trump’s “crazy, stupid” claims about the safety of the combined MMR vaccine for undermining faith in immunization. Asked about Trump’s comment that “nothing bad can happen” from advising parents to get six separate shots for their children instead of two, Cassidy told CNN on Sunday: “If it wasn’t so potentially tragic, you would break out laughing at a comment like that.” Hayden Panettiere, the actor known for her roles in television shows such as Heroes and Nashville, has died at the age of 36. Her father, Skip Panettiere, asked for privacy “as our family takes time to process this unimaginable loss”.
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